iSearchBetter.com Improves Amazon.com's Search Results
Back in February, Ben and I were whining about the poor job Amazon does differentiating between products available for free shipping through Amazon Prime and those that are not. As far as we can tell, it largely breaks down based on who's shipping the product: products coming directly from Amazon qualify while those from 3rd parties do not.
Six months have passed and Amazon hasn't gotten around to fixing what we consider to be a problem, but someone else has. Jacob Vogelstein created a new product search for Amazon that searches for only NEW products available from Amazon that qualify for Prime and/or SuperSaver shipping called iSearchBetter.com.
Here is an example of when this is particularly useful. Check out the search results for [timex ironman 53151]:
Amazon provides three different prices, shipping costs, and suppliers of the exact same watch: One has free shipping, one can ship for free if it's part of a larger total order size, and the other costs just under $5 to ship.
Compare that to iSearchBetter.com's
results for the same search:
iSearchBetter did indeed search better by filtering out the non-Prime eligible products.
The search interface is a little clunky, requiring users to pick an appropriate category before running a search. Some categories are empty and it's not clear whether this means nothing on Amazon in that category qualifies for free shipping or if there's a glitch on iSearchBetter.
1. Posted by: Jacob on October 29, 2006 6:40 AM:
As the developer of iSearchBetter, I would like to thank Technology Evangelist for featuring my website, and I thought I should address the concerns raised by the author of the above article.
First, the reason you can't search all categories at once is that Amazon doesn't provide such an option in their web services API. The closest thing they have to "search all categories" is the "blended" category, which selectively searches some categories and leaves others out (a list is available in the Amazon E-Commerce Service Developer Guide). In preliminary testing, I found that people were more annoyed that blended searches didn't return some results (such as baby supplies, automotive parts, etc.) than they were at having to select a category for each search, so I went with the latter option to ensure comprehensive results.
Second, the reason why some categories are empty is that Amazon's database has a number of categories that contain no products! This issue only manifests itself when you browse through categories on my site; searches typically avoid empty categories. However, when browsing, it becomes apparent that the Amazon database includes "container" categories that have subcategories with products, but do not actually have any products themselves. This can lead to some counterintuitive results: for example, the top-level category "Books" has no products listed, but the subcategory "Books > Subjects" returns thousands of hits. So for the top-level categories (Books, Electronics, etc), I created a work-around to avoid confusion -- users expect to be able to browse the top-level of Books, for example -- but I can't implement that solution for all of the tens or hundreds of subcategories that may be empty. Again, you won't experience this issue if you search for products, but if you explore the Amazon database via the links on my site, you'll see what I mean.
I'm definitely interested in alternative solutions to both of these issues, so if anyone has any suggestions, please email me: webmaster AT isearchbetter DOT com.